Famously never colonized by Europeans, Ethiopia has not only constituted a pivotal, if complex, imaginary in transatlantic histories of Blackness but has in turn been informed by them. In describing this tension, I move between three ethnographic, historical, and infrastructural spaces: colonial legacies of urban planning, political visions of Addis Ababa as the renaissance capital city that encompasses the state, and, more centrally, young men and women on the economic and social sidelines of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. Describing urban residents who navigate, build and labor amidst rubble, roadworks, and ongoing demolitions, I argue that their embodied work resists narratives of marginality and submission. Instead, I propose to think of their labor, imaginaries, and the surrounds as "Blackness as infrastructure.” This talk will address how racial configurations in East Africa, Italian colonial and contemporary forms of imperialism are not only localized, but tethered to the circulation of transatlantic and Indian ocean discourses on slavery, and indeed global forms of blackness.

Bio

Sabine Mohamed is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University and currently works on her first book Losing Ground: Emergent Black Empire and Counter-Futures in Urban Ethiopia. Sabine is an urban, political and economic anthropologist whose research and writing explores empire-making in the global south, and how urban and port life intersects with gendered histories of race and blackness in East Africa, as well as Germany.